Hi GK Love your show.

December 7, 2004 |

Hi GK
Love your show. It is simply the very best in radio and despite the fact that the BBC make it quite difficult to find it here in Scotland, we hear it each week through satellite TV. Brilliantly funny, witty and keenly observed. And it brings us in touch with musicians unheard of in our country. Maybe one day we'll make it across to a show in the States.

Lorna Dey,
Aberdeenshire, Scotland

Lorna, you're a sweetheart. I've not been to Aberdeen but did get up to Huntly once to rummage around in a graveyard and take snapshots of stones for my Aunt Mary, whose people were buried there, and I have old pals north of Pitlochry, living on a mountaintop there, and a pal in Leven, on the coast, in the Kingdom of Fife. And of course my grandpa came from Glasgow almost a century ago. I want to take some family back to the old country to celebrate his crossing, if only we can find some old steamship to board and stand at the rail as she steams away to the west. We still don't understand why he came over. He had a good job there, working for the railroad, same as he did in the U.S., so it wasn't for money, and it wasn't for love  he brought a wife and five wee bairns  and it wasn't to escape the sheriff, so what? Scots people are tight-lipped about personal matters, it seems. He went back for a visit in 1925 and kept a detailed diary of his return voyage, what time he rose, what he ate for breakfast, who he saw, and so forth, until he arrived in Glasgow and his relatives were there and then he wrote no further. Isn't that amazing? We're left to assume that he came to America to get away from his stepmother and perhaps to escape a faint lingering air of scandal surrounding the circumstances of his marriage. But the things we most want to know about him, he kept from us.